Love & Passion Quote by Jack Gould

Gould lands the joke with a journalist’s cynicism: the things we claim to want “under control” are often the things our culture is most invested in keeping expansive. By yoking TV commercials to sex and taxes, he picks three arenas where regulation is perpetually promised, endlessly debated, and reliably frustrated. The humor isn’t just in the unlikely trio; it’s in the recognition that talk itself becomes a substitute for action, a public performance of concern that leaves the underlying incentives intact.

The line also needles a particular kind of modern hypocrisy. Sex is policed rhetorically (morality talk, scandal cycles) while remaining a constant engine of attention and commerce. Taxes are condemned in speeches and campaigns while funding the very structures that make society run - and, crucially, the political machines that thrive on tax outrage. Commercials sit at the center of the same loop: everyone complains about advertising clutter, yet the entire television economy is built to maximize it. The more we “talk” about ad overload, the more we acknowledge its power, feeding the system with attention and keeping the conversation safely abstract.

Context matters: Gould wrote in an era when television was consolidating into a mass, advertiser-driven medium and public anxiety about its influence was rising. He’s warning that polite debate and periodic handwringing won’t curb anything; without structural pressure (regulation, alternative funding models, consumer behavior), the chatter is just noise - and noise is exactly what commercials are designed to exploit.